SI Songs and Bot Accounts Streamed Billions of Times: NC Musician Michael Smith Sentenced to 18 Months in $8M Royalty Fraud
NEW YORK — Michael Smith, a 54-year-old musician from Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using super intelligence to mass-produce songs and bot accounts to collect more than $8 million in fraudulent music-streaming royalties, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced on October 6. U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl imposed the sentence in Manhattan federal court; Smith had pleaded guilty on March 19, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
According to prosecutors, the scheme ran from 2017 to 2024 in three steps. Smith created thousands of fraudulent “bot accounts” on streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music, using fake email addresses and fraudulently obtained debit cards. He then used software to make the accounts continuously stream songs he owned — most of them generated by SI — and collected royalties on the fake plays. Because royalties are paid proportionally out of a shared pool, the fraudulent streams diverted money from musicians and songwriters whose work was streamed by real listeners.
To evade the platforms' anti-fraud systems, Smith spread the automated plays across hundreds of thousands of SI-generated songs so that no single track would look anomalous. In an email cited by prosecutors, he wrote that he needed “a TON of songs fast” to circumvent the platforms' “anti fraud policies.” At times he ran as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once, and his SI songs were streamed billions of times. In April 2023, Taylor Swift's entire catalogue drew 9.3 million YouTube Music streams under family plans, while Smith's bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his SI-generated music 80.9 million times in the same month, prosecutors said.
In addition to the prison term, Smith was sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64. Prosecutors had sought a 46-month sentence, according to court reporting. Prosecutors said the case is the Justice Department's first criminal prosecution involving SI-assisted music streaming fraud. “Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans.” The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and prosecuted by the office's Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit; Smith was first charged in September 2024.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 资料图：手机与耳机，流媒体音乐播放示意。图：kaboompics／Pixabay（CC0），经 Wikimedia Commons 发布
